Women stand on a street ahead of the Lunar New Year celebration at the Chinatown in Bangkok, Thailand, February 10, 2021. (Photo by Chalinee Thirasupa/Reuters)

A man looks at a figure outside a store as he walks along a street in Beijing on March 2, 2021. (Photo by Wang Zhao/AFP Photo)

A man transports a car on a horse cart to a repair shop along a street in Amritsar on May 6, 2021. (Photo by Narinder Nanu/AFP Photo)

An Afghan woman clad in burqa begs in a snow-covered street in Kabul, Afghanistan on January 7, 2020. (Photo by Mohammad Ismail/Reuters)

An Afghan boy carrying empty plastic cans, walks along a street in Kabul on December 21, 2023. (Photo by Wakil Kohsar/AFP Photo)

A woman dressed in traditional clothing visits a business street in Beijing on June 5, 2024. (Photo by Wang Zhao/AFP Photo)

A woman poses for a photo in a vehicle parked on the street as a tourist attraction, in Bangkok, Thailand on July 29, 2019. (Photo by Soe Zeya Tun/Reuters)

Most people know Nikon as a purveyor of pro and consumer-grade digital cameras. But the company's expertise with optics bleeds over into related markets – it's one of the science community's major suppliers of microscopes. And each year the company asks the community to send it some of their favorite images of tiny objects. A panel of scientists and journalists have chosen the best of this past year's submissions, which Nikon has placed on its Small World site.

Photo: Honorable Mention. “Snow crystal, illuminated with colored lights (5x)”. (Photo by Dr. Kenneth Libbrecht, California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Department of Physics, Pasadena, California, USA)